


The Sidekick

by AgentCoop



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1940s Comic Book Cap, 2012 non-enhanced Bucky Barnes, Alternate Universe - Crack, Angst and Feels, Arnie Roth - Freeform, Avengers Family, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers Feels, Bunkers, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Cats, Comic Book Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Humor, M/M, Nick Fury is Not Amused, POV Bucky Barnes, Pop Culture, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, SHIELD, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Tentacle Monsters, Time Travel, Writer Bucky Barnes, coffeeshop au discourse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 07:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16113272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentCoop/pseuds/AgentCoop
Summary: Meet Bucky.Bucky hates his life. Bucky works for a large security and counterterrorism conglomeorate in their public relations office as a copyeditor. He likes MST3K reruns, reading sci-fi and fantasy novels, writing unpublished editorials about the unfairness of the world we live in, and enjoys being in the company of his cat, Mr. Fluffypants.Bucky hates everything else about the world.Meet Steve.Steve is Captain America. Steve is a morally upstanding young man who fights crime and protects the world from evil. Steve wears spandex, carries a shield, and always has a smile on his face.Steve is pleasantly optimistic about the fate of the world.Meet Bucky and Steve. Fighting aliens, discovering ancient artifacts, and generally juggling the fate of the universe, with a smile and a decent sized dose of sarcasm.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my incredible beta reader and friend [Mystrana](http://mystrana.tumblr.com)! Pretty sure I wouldn't have finished this without you :)
> 
> Thank you to [Daphne](https://daphneblithe.tumblr.com/) for talking me through some awesome pop culture jokes!
> 
> Follow me on [here!](https://iamagentcoop.tumblr.com/)
> 
> AND THE ART!!
> 
> The wonderful artists who I worked with for the Captain America Big Bang 2018 did a fantastic job recreating some scenes!!  
> [An Awkward Avocado](https://anawkwardavocadoart.tumblr.com/)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/a/WOmEkVT)
> 
> [Deb Walsh](https://debwalsh.tumblr.com/)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/Ki32Bqr)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/vrdqJIi)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/B0gsTm6)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/9LRB8Jw)

He's drinking a cappuccino at the corner cafe when the first decapitated alien bursts through the front window, sending an explosion of shattered glass flying through the air. One particularly large fragment drops in his cup with a sickening plop and the hot liquid splashes up onto his hands. 

“Crap.”

It's highly indicative of the sheer number of times this damn planet has been under attack by alien forces that watching the scaled dead carapace of a foreign body roll towards him garners only this reaction.

The head rolls to a stop, bumping the table leg, and Bucky looks down, watching the leaking green goo slowly stain his white tennis shoes. "Crap," he says again as he bends down to rub at his shoes.

The baristas are all crammed behind the bar, trying to keep some semblance of barrier between them and the escalating fight outside while simultaneously filming on their cell phone cameras, fighting for the best shot for their Instagram feeds. There’s a mother with her young daughter behind Bucky, and they take shelter underneath a table. He feels a momentary stab of pity for the look of fear in the young girl’s eyes, but before he can move to help, another metallic looking body flies through the broken window—this time with its head firmly attached. 

It turns with a jarring chittering sound and looks right at him, and Bucky doesn’t think twice before picking up the empty chair next to him and flinging it with all his might directly at the creature’s face. 

It doesn’t even flinch. Instead, it hisses—a low, serpentine sound—and its mandibles clack together. It’s supposed to be frightening, this completely unearthly and indescribably extraterrestrial creature of doom and destruction but instead?

It’s fucking annoying. 

And of course, the chair hits, and the damnable hellspawn doesn’t even flinch. Before Bucky knows it, there are six more aliens stepping delicately on pronged feet through the window towards him and for shit’s sake, he didn’t spend fifty grand for a degree in investigative journalism from Princeton to be standing throwing punches at things made of metal and greying, peely flesh, and—

Green goo. Which is now also covering his glasses. So he can’t even see when it steps right up to him, but he can sure as hell smell it—that foul putrid breath. It’s the last thing he remembers before he goes down under the headbutt.

Let’s rewind.

 _Bucky’s seven when he gets his first pair of glasses. Thick metal frames, soda bottle lenses, the works. He can see though, and just that’s enough to make him giddy with joy. Now he can read. He can bike down the couple blocks to the local branch of their library_ — _a one-roomed, decrepit building that smells of mold and must. He’s never been happier in his life than when the old lady librarian behind the desk looks down at him and wrinkles her nose in disgust before delivering a five minute diatribe on the responsibilities of library card ownership including (with absolutely no exception) the drawer of shame where she pulls out polaroids of other young men of questionable parentage who have broken the rules and dared to returned a damaged item._

_But he has a card. And it unlocks a world of excitement and wonder and dusty paperback copies of Hardy Boys adventures._

_He visits near daily. Checks out everything he can, cradles the books carefully within his arms at home and retreats to the corner of the tiny room he shares with his sister to read._

_The kids at school make fun of him. Call him four-eyes, and loser, and geek, and honestly, these kids are shit with the clever nicknaming, but it doesn’t stop him from hauling off and socking one in the jaw so hard that the boy’s nose starts to bleed and the principal calls his mom, and it’s a whole affair_ —

Too far, he thinks groggily as the chittering, mandibled hellspawn looks at him curiously, then punches him in the nose.

_He’s fifteen when their apartment complex goes up in flames. Some idiot left the gas stove on cooking Kraft or ramen or something equally unappetizing because hey, they live in the slums of Brooklyn, and believe it or not, fresh pulled-from-the-earth carrots cost more than a box of mac-and-cheese._

_Not that the current food choices of the lower class matters much, though. He’s getting sidetracked._

_It all burns. Food, bedding, clothing, people. That’s not entirely a true statement_ — _all_ — _because Bucky doesn’t burn. At 4:06pm_ — _the precise moment the Tilden Houses go up in flames_ — _he’s at the library, rifling through the card catalog for books on Israel, Palestine, and the Palestine National Authority. He’s long past the Hardy Boys at this point and has taken an interest in politics instead_ — _mostly the socio-economic effects of long term conflict in third world countries. He thinks maybe someday he’ll save the world._

 _He can’t even get onto his block once he leaves the library_ — _t’s all sectioned off for the paramedics and firefighters. It’s not until late that night that he learns that the only survivors were those who weren’t in the building at the time of the fire and those on the bottom three floors with quick access to an escape. If there’s one thing that New York Authority Housing is fantastic at, it’s poorly maintained buildings._

_He lived on the eighth floor with his mom and sister. They didn’t make it out._

_To be honest, he doesn’t have much time for mourning, since the next day the twin towers fall and suddenly all of New York is thrown into chaos. He’s shuffled into foster home after foster home, and the only thing that really weighs on his mind much is that he never got a chance to say goodbye to the cranky, old, librarian who is now one of the people who knows him best._

Bucky flinches as the creature rears back for another hit, and the world blurs in and out of focus. He blinks, steadying himself for just one moment, then he’s being pulled by one of the creatures, and he is getting really tired of this shit. 

_It’s 2009 when the Incredible Hulk breaks Harlem. It’s surprisingly contained. The world doesn’t suddenly shift off of its axis, and (to Bucky’s amazement) a new string of hero-worshipping religious sects don’t pop up. It is what it is. Superheroes. They exist. And to be honest, at this point in his life? He doesn’t fucking care._

_There are world crisis every hour and he’s scrambling to keep up with it all and still maintain some degree of professionalism in his shit job at a small internet news company in Hoboken. He spends his days fetching coffee and smiling sweetly at the journalists who have ‘put in their time’ and ‘done the grind’ and spends his nights furiously typing up essays and reports and articles on every catastrophe he can possibly find just hoping that maybe someone, somewhere will think his particular piece sheds light on the viciousness and tragedy of human nature in just the right way to tantalize the 311.6 million people of America._

_It sucks to be mining the tragedy of the world to pay the rent, but apparently that’s what his career is and fuck it, he doesn’t want to save the world anymore, he just wants to sleep._

_Besides. The superheroes can do the world saving now. Except every time they step in, they seem to cause more and more destruction. Because superheroes are great for preventing the destruction of the earth, but they don’t seem to give a damn about high rise apartments or coffee shops or the disastrous economic catastrophes they leave in their wake._

_Being eaten by fucking aliens might just be the better alternative._

Speaking of which. The one dragging him is looking at him again, and Bucky has that sinking feeling in his stomach that it’s either going to sink its pointy metal teeth into the flesh of his leg, or maybe it will just hurl him into the sky and use him as some sort of human ballistic missile. And sure, there are parts of humanity that drive him up the wall, but there are also really good moments in life. Like laying on his incredible queen mattress. With Mr. Fluffypants. Who’d be tragically uncared for were he to not return to the apartment this evening and open up a can of Fancy Feast (because Mr. Fluffypants has classy taste).

So Bucky sighs (as melodramatically as a sigh can be while you are being dragged by one foot through the debris and broken glass of yet another destroyed New York coffee shop) and rolls suddenly, kicking out one leg and surprising the thing just enough for it to lose its grip. 

Bucky’s on his feet again, and his glasses are on the floor, but he’s ready to take on these fuckers when who should come flying through the window in a graceful yet somehow incredibly ridiculous roll but Captain America himself.

“Avengers…” he throws his fist up in the air and manages to look even more like a giant caricature than normal, which up until this point, Bucky thought was absolutely impossible. “Assemble!”

The creature turns and chitters away at its friends, and then, to Bucky’s complete shock, shrugs its shoulders. Then it runs forward and tackles the Cap and just like that they are brawling good enough for any drunken bar at Bucky’s feet.

“I said, Avengers, Assemble!” Cap gasps out and Bucky looks out the window as the arrow-dude Avenger goes pelting through the air to splat against the side of a building, sliding down with all the finesse of a squashed bug.

“Pretty sure they’re busy, buddy,” Bucky mutters, and bends down to pick up a broken chair leg. He swings and brains the alien holding down Cap, and the superhero bursts upwards with a smile on his face under that ungodly hideous cowl of his. 

“Many thanks, friend!”

He salutes. He actually _salutes_. And Bucky just stares as Cap goes back to punching aliens. 

At least for the time being, the aliens seem to think that Captain America himself is a target worth taking down, rather than the exasperated be-spectacled young man who really just wants to drink his cappuccino in the relative quiet of a hipster coffee bar. Bucky watches Cap punch out a few and throw his shield back and forth a few times, dancing with movement. Cap is smiling and muttering something under his breath as he moves to the storefront window while sending oncoming creatures flying much in the same manner as Hawkeye did just five minutes prior. (Alright, yes, he does actually know the name of arrow-dude. As difficult as you’d think it would be to keep up with the ever-revolving door of farcical superhero personages who join the cast of the Avengers, it’s actually a bit hard to forget the one who shows up constantly on local news networks covered in peeling children’s themed band aids and sports tape.)

The tide of the battle or attack or whatever-the-hell you want to call it does seem to be turning. Bucky looks across the street and in the settling dust and rubble of the decimated shop next door another couple of Avengers are high-fiving and smiling.

Apparently when an alien species arrives on earth and you and your buddies wipe them all out before the evening news team can even arrive to get any footage, you just hang out and shoot the shit. Seems obvious.

Bucky turns then and gestures towards the mom and her daughter who are still hiding under an overturned table. “It’s alright. Superheros are just finishing up. It’ll be alright.” The daughter seems to almost believe his words. She crawls forward an inch and looks to her left, then her right, as if watching for oncoming traffic. “Look,” he says pointing, “It’s Captain America!” He tries to put a happy upbeat tone to his words, but truth be told, Captain America looks like a giant douche.

Look. Cap’s still fighting a couple alien creature creatures full of green goo but he could at least have the common courtesy not to smile while doing it. And sing. He’s like a walking advertisement for the GOP. Bucky’s head feels fuzzy and muddled, and he can’t seem to think up a more decent insult, but he keeps trying as he squints and sways..

It comes as a complete surprise when another _thing_ jumps on him from behind and just like that he’s back in the fight, turning and screaming and swinging with all his might. 

Somewhere on his right, he hears Captain America call out to him. “Watch out, kid!” Bucky swears and manages to knock the alien free, no thanks to the incredibly belated warning from Sir Superhero himself, but this time when he punches out, his fist connects with pure metal. The bones of his hand shatter on impact and Bucky falls to his knees mouthing out every cuss word that comes to mind. All of his senses narrow in on this, his hand, this incredible pain of bones grinding together with every breath, but he doesn’t pass out.

If there’s one thing Bucky knows, it’s pain. He’s been fighting for every breath since he was born. And this sucks, but it’s not going to stop him.

Or so he thinks.

Before he knows it, Captain America is in front of him, looking down.

“Battle’s over, kid.”

Bucky squints up at him, watching the soft coffee shop lighting surround this enormous being in front of him and highlight him like....”Jesus Fucking Christ,” he says, then pushes himself up with his good hand. “Next time you all feel like fighting fucking…” he puts his hand in another pile of green goo while trying to stand. “Jesus,” he repeats. “Next time you decide alien warfare would make for fun afternoon entertainment maybe just take it to Jersey.”

“Are you hurt?” Captain America’s voice booms out over the dust and alien carcasses like he’s holding a megaphone.

Bucky squints even harder. The way Cap phrases the question is so...campy c-roll action flick that Bucky honestly thinks he has to be kidding. There’s broken furniture and dust and plaster and alien carcasses strewn about haphazardly all around them and Captain America is smiling down at him asking if he’s hurt. 

“Uh…” he starts, but stops just as quickly as the Cap actually raises his arms and places his hands on his hips. 

He’s staring down at Bucky. Like he’s actually the savior of the goddamn planet and not the reason extraterrestrials now attack earth multiple times a year. 

“Uh,” Bucky repeats. His hand is throbbing. “Think I’m good. Just gonna take a rest here. For a bit.”

Captain America steps forward, bends down, and thrusts his hands under Bucky’s body, scooping him up like some featherweight bride of the fifties. It’s completely unnecessary, horribly humiliating, and of course this is what he does. Because he’s Captain America, and he walks around actually saying ‘Avengers Assemble,’ and he’s a giant cuddly teddy bear of American patriotism and spirit. 

And now he’s carrying Bucky out of the coffee shop.

“Are you kidding me right now?” Bucky yells, but Cap doesn’t so much as look at him. “Hey! I’m fine!” Not even a flinch. They are outside now and Bucky is astounded by the wreckage of the street before him, but he’s also just pissed now. “There is a fucking child inside and you are carrying me!” 

Cap finally stops and looks at him, then merely smiles and changes direction. “Hey, Tony?”

Ironman walks forward. Bucky should at least feel a little bit of excitement about being in the presence of America’s superheroes but instead he’s mostly just annoyed. His hand hurts, he hasn’t had enough coffee, and he’s pretty sure that no amount of scrubbing is going to get the green bodily fluid off his sneakers. 

“Yup?”

Bucky’s jostled ever so slightly as Cap motions with his shoulders. “There’s a kid and her mom still inside. They’re fine–-no injuries, nothing. Just a little shaken up. Couple of wait staff as well.”

“Pretty sure they’re called baristas, Steve.”

“Would you look at that, Tony? I learn something new everyday thanks to your exceptional wisdom and guidance!!”

“Steve,” Bucky calls up, and both Steve and Ironman/Tony/giant douchecanoe in the metal suit look down at him. “As much as this has made for a thrilling saga for my social media, could you _please_ put me down?”

“Aww, Cap made a new friend,” drolls Tony.

“Just need to get you to a paramedic, kid, and they can’t make it all the way down the street yet.”

Bucky is ready to completely ignore the throbbing pain of his broken hand and use it to punch through the clearly-not-metal of Cap’s jaw, but a rush of vertigo overtakes him, and suddenly, horribly, he’s seeing colors and feeling pressure, and

 _Oh this is fucking fantastic,_ he thinks, right before he passes out in the arms of Captain America himself.


	2. Chapter 2

The office knows his name now. 

He was perfectly content to work in his cubicle with his earbuds pushed in as far as possible, taking the sporadic break to wander silently through the narrow hallways to refill his mug with coffee (black, thank you) and occasionally visit the bathroom to piss. 

Now people talk to him.

Now he refills his mug and they make little comments like “that kind of day, am I right?” and “Gotta get that coffee in before the next alien attack, yeah?” wink, wink, nudge. Today’s extremely uncomfortable conversation started innocently enough:

“Hey, you know that picture that was in the paper?” 

And Bucky finds himself nodding along because of course he knows the picture; it was on the front page of the New York Times: Captain America holding a fainting civilian who’d managed to eviscerate his fair share of aliens alongside actual superheroes.

“Dude, my girlfriend totally won’t stop talking about how you guys are soulmates. She is like, obsessing over you both.”

Bucky just sips his coffee in silence and gave his best ‘I-will-rip-apart-the-paper-cutter-sitting-right-here-at-this-here-table-and-cut-you-with-the-blade-part’ glare until his coworker slowly backs away and out of the break room.

It is what it is. S.H.I.E.L.D is known by most as a special forces law-enforcement and counter terrorism unit, and yes, there are enormous branches of the company that deal with just that. There are also branches that deal in bioterrorism and biological warfare. There are branches that are so deep in the science and experimental divisions that Bucky doesn’t even know what major city they function out of. 

And then, there is this office. Here. In the heart of Manhattan. 

Public Relations.

It’s as far from anything exciting and innovative as humanly possible, and as attracting of absolute just-out-of-college assholes as any job could possibly be.

Bucky’s a copyeditor for an enormously influential corporation. So yes, it’s one step up from the crappy internet paper job and almost somewhat in the line of work he actually went to school for. And sure, it comes with health benefits and a pretty damn decent paycheck.

But some asshole’s girlfriend is currently fantasizing about Bucky and Captain America, and Bucky now knows about it thanks to the apparently defunct office code of etiquette.

So there’s that.

_He remembered a time when writing was fun. When it felt like he might change something, somewhere. It was one of his graduate school thesis projects: documenting the hunger crisis in Brooklyn. He used the neighborhood he grew up in as one of the control groups, desperate to bring some attention to the food deserts, the lack of government housing, the lack of work, and most notably, the inability to qualify for or have the time to qualify for government assistance._

_He interviewed kids. He interviewed parents. He interviewed social workers whose client load was so extreme that they would oftentimes not visit a family for months at a time. He took the train in and walked the streets he’d grown up on, watching the children play in the streets and listening to mothers hollering for them to ‘come in, come to dinner!’ He remembered what it was like to make his single mother’s paycheck once a week stretch for the entire month of bills, rent, and food._

_He landed an NYU Reporting Grant for that work. Picked up that internet job right out of college and was quickly snatched up by S.H.I.E.L.D shortly thereafter. They cited his innovative eye, his willingness to be out in the field, his youth and vigor for change. Then they stuck him behind a desk, writing copy with promises of future editorials on world crisis._

_And he stuck with them. Because he believed it._

_He’d heard rumors of their underground departments. Full bunkers of scientific anomalies, experiments, arcane artifacts whose purpose still eluded those who discovered them. And he learned that there really was still a part of him that was excited by a mystery, by an unsolved puzzle. A part of him that strove to be the one to discover that the solution to a humanitarian crisis might just be sitting underneath him, waiting for his touch._

_Well._

_Not underneath him per se._

_Somewhere, in some building, in some city, hidden away, like a long lost treasure–_

“Hello, young friend!”

The booming voice jolts Bucky out of his reverie and as he looks up, a wave of dismay washes down his stomach to his toes.

The office interns are already whispering in the doorway. People are standing from their cubicles. Looking at him. Looking at the tall figure, inhumanly bursting from his star-spattered spandex. 

Bucky sighs. “Do you particularly enjoy walking the streets of Manhattan in costume?”

Captain America— _Steve_ —Bucky mentally corrects, then curses himself for even remembering that part, laughs. “It’s comfortable! Perfectly tailored to me and ready for any fight that may roll my direction, no matter how big, no matter how small. Look here!” Steve circles around the lip of the cubicle wall and stands right next to Bucky, holding out his arm. “Look at the stitching! Perfection. And I would know,” he whispers conspiratorially. “My Ma sewed all my clothes back before the war, and I had to mend them myself when they tore!”

Bucky stares at him.

Steve just grins and elbows him in the side like they’re old pals. His eyes are deep blue from underneath the cowl, but even that is absolute insanity. What kind of man, even a superhero man, goes about his daily life wearing a complete headpiece fashioned around his eyes and jawline? Captain America is clearly insane.

He’s also still elbowing Bucky in the side.

“Uh. Yeah. Real nice. Stitching.” Bucky turns back to his computer and firmly eyes the words still up on the screen—words he’d typed before this walking American Beefcake Insane Possibly Alien Creature™ appeared.

“You look much better!” Steve barks in the happiest tone imaginable, and Bucky can already tell the entire office is going to have a field day with this. He can see the headline in his mind’s eye: 

_**Previously Unknown Recluse Hurls Self From Skyscraper to Escape Friendly But Inane Repartee of New York’s First Avenger: Captain America.** _

“Yes,” Bucky waves his splinted arm above his head while refusing to take his eyes off the screen. “All good now.”

“I know a few tips for bathing with a cast,” Steve adds helpfully.

Bucky spins around on his magical twirly and also pivoty office chair. “I’m sorry. Did you _need_ something?”

“Just checking in on you, my fellow alien fighter!” Steve puts his hands on his hips. Again.

“Well,” Bucky waves his splinted and bandaged arm. Again. “Doing just fine. You’re welcome to go back to...whatever it is you do during the day. Saving the world. Or speed skating.”

“Is it possible to skate while speeding?” He’s just looking at Bucky. Staring at him. Like this is an honest-to-god for-serious question.

“I…” Bucky shuts his mouth. He doesn’t even know what to say anymore. “Just, go back to it. Whatever it was I mean. That you were doing.”

“Oh!” Steve exclaims. “I’m actually quite free all day! Would you care to accompany me down to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters? They have this new prototype for my shield that they’ve been working on, and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on it.”

“I’m working.” Bucky looks back at his screen and refuses to look up again. Maybe if he ignores him, the giant man in spandex will leave. Is it too late to pretend he’s deaf? Maybe he’ll pretend he’s deaf. Though, Steve doesn’t seem the sort to understand sarcasm or basic human social cues, so he’d probably just believe the charade and swoop in to throw Bucky over his shoulder and carry him back down out of the office, screaming for help the entire way.

Bucky extends a finger and types the letter q. Again. And again. 

The booming voice echoes around the office. “It helps if you have someone to scrub your back when you shower. So that you don’t get your cast wet. And you still get clean.”

Bucky grabs his leather messenger bag from underneath the old desk and pushes past Captain Fucking America, his cheeks already burning as the flush rises. 

“Come on,” he mumbles. “Let’s go get your shield.”

***

Shield Headquarters is stationed down a suspiciously dark and gloomy alleyway and sandwiched between a decrepit looking pawn shop and a small dusty storefront advertising fresh juice.

Bucky’s pretty certain the latter is a drug front. Hipster juice-drinkers don’t usually frequent dark alleyways in the bowels of Manhattan. 

They walk through the front doors, and Bucky eyes the peeling letter work on the side window.

S. E.L.D. He dquar rs

8 Nickels Ave.

He eyes the bent and broken latch to the building’s door, which has clearly seen a break-in attempt or two. Now would be a fantastic time to feign a phone call, or illness, or sudden onset of extreme bowel discomfort and just walk himself the hell away from this corner of urban decay.

But it’s too late.

Steve grabs his arm and pulls him inside to the flickering fluorescent lights that cast the entire grimy office space in an old yellowed hue.

“Dolores!” Steve exclaims, his smile growing impossibly wider as he nods a greeting to the woman sitting at the front desk.

“Oh my goodness, Mr. Captain America, it’s always just such a pleasure to see you young man!”

Dolores looks to be well into her second century of life. Her wrinkled skin hangs off the bones of her body, and the fire-engine red lipstick she’s painted thickly over her thin lips doesn’t help. She looks somewhat like a cadaverous flesh eating zombie. 

A cadaverous flesh eating zombie in a pale green cardigan with pearl buttons.

Bucky looks back down at the grimy, tiled floor and toes the tip of his sneaker against the darkened grout.

“Now now, Dolores. I’m older than you!” Steve has sidled up to the counter and leaned over. The spandex stretches even tighter along every line of his skin as he reaches out and takes the lady’s hand and brings it gently to his lips.

Villains never have to wear spandex. The Avengers could really use themselves a new costume designer.

“Who’s your friend, dear?”

Bucky looks up again as she speaks, and Dolores is looking at him—her lipstick stained teeth showing through a thinly stretched mouth. 

Alright, alright. She looks more like his grandmother than a zombie. He flinches then, a full body shudder as a memory forces its way to the surface.

_The smell of cinnamon surrounds him in the small kitchen. He’s watching his Grandma take out the freshly baked snickerdoodles from the oven, and the wave of heat washes over his skin. He looks across the table to where his sister is sitting, and he scootches down in his chair just far enough that he can reach out and kick her shins._

_“Mom!” Becca yells, and Bucky quickly pushes himself up again and turns back to the open oven, pretending as though nothing had happened._

_“James, keep your body away from your sister,” his mom calls out from the other room. She sounds exasperated, but Bucky just grins. He raises an eyebrow subtly at Becca as she clears, then reaches out and taps her once more._

_“MOM!”_

_“James Buchanan Barnes, if you don’t stand up and move away from your sister I will completely lose it–”_

_“Cookie?” his Grandmother asks, a sweet, delightful grin painting her face._

_“Yes, please!” Bucky chirps._

_“Then get your ass out of that chair and get it yourself.”_

_Becca collapses into a fit of giggles and Bucky wrinkles his nose in irritation, but then his Grandma’s laughing too, and his mom pokes her head around the door casing to see what all the commotion is, and a tickle works its way up the back of his throat and he laughs—throaty, full-bellied sound of a chubby eight year old who is loved by all around him._

“Hey, kid.”

Bucky’s cheeks are hot, and he looks up. Star Spangled Man With A Plan is staring down at him, and Dolores the zombie-grandmother is looking at him with concern evident in her eyes.

He reaches up and grabs at his glasses—takes a moment to wipe them on his shirt before placing the plastic frames back on top of his nose. It’s all pretense at this point. He doesn’t want to talk yet. But Steve is still looking at him, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to sit here in a back alley reception office any longer, so he clears his throat—the sound as harsh as the yellow lighting all around them.

“I’ve gotta get home soon so–”

“Right!” Just like that, Steve grabs his arm and pulls him to a narrow door to the left of the receptionist counter. It’s labeled with a large black plastic card with painted white letters. 

_Utility Closet_

None of the painted white letters are peeling. If Bucky had to guess, he’d say this door led to mops, an electrical box, perhaps if they’re really lucky, a box of rubber gloves for heavy duty cleaning. If Bucky had to guess, he’d say this door absolutely does not lead to a high-tech, experimental, government owned, vibranium filled shield prototype. 

“Right this way!” Steve says cheerfully, and he pushes Bucky in.

***

There’s a mop. 

That’s the first thing Bucky notices before Steve squishes in beside him and shuts the door—leaving them pressed together in complete blackness. 

“Hey, I bet if you pull the mop handle we’ll be transported into a magical wonderland of hidden S.H.I.E.L.D. technology.” 

Steve’s fumbling around behind him for a moment, and then he pulls the mop handle.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bucky mumbles in disgust. 

Yes, Bucky is not a complete idiot and has figured by now that this closet really will turn into some sort of hidden elevator. But Jesus. It’s a top secret government agency hidden away in the most crime-ridden section of the city, and even Rick from Accounting could guess that the mop handle is the lever, and Rick from Accounting cuts the crusts off his sandwiches.

He’d roll his eyes, but no one would be able to see, so it just seems like wasted energy.

They descend for what feels like an eternity, but at some point Bucky starts to see images passing by in front of his face. There is a window here—a small one, nestled behind the Scrubbing Bubbles Magic Toilet Brush replacements and the paper towels. Bucky pushes back just slightly so he can better see, and it looks like they are speeding past floors faster than he’s ever driven.

He wonders for a moment why he can’t feel a change in momentum—why his stomach didn’t lurch with the start of the machine, and how they could have possibly designed something so seamless, so transitionally beautiful. He’s about to ask, when the door they originally entered from swings open, and he realizes that they’ve stopped—so quietly and gently that it’s almost as if they were never moving at all.

“Steven.” A large, foreboding character in a black trenchcoat is standing there, glaring at them both through his one good eye. The tone of his voice is all kinds of condescending, and Bucky straightens, crosses his arms in front of him and glares. 

“Nick!” Steve responds cheerfully. He strides out of the supply closet with a saunter that would make a tomcat hiss in jealousy.

“Who’s the kid.”

There isn’t even a question implied, just raw power and control. Bucky’s had enough of it.

“I’m two years older than Capsicle over here so I’d appreciate you forgoing the dripping disdain.”

Steve barks a laugh and looks back at Bucky, an actual twinkle dancing in his eye. “Are you really? Older than me?”

“You’re 92 years and counting,” Nick states.

Bucky glares harder at ‘Nick-the-asshole-in-black’ while Steve just friendly taps him shoulder to shoulder. 

“For all intents and purposes I’m 28, Nick. Cut the kid some slack–”

“Who _is_ the kid, Steven–”

“Stop calling me a fucking kid!”

They both turn and stare at him now and Bucky’s not even going to give them the courtesy of going red at the outburst because damn it, they’re both being assholes, and he’s just been escorted through the bowels of Brooklyn to a dingy office space with a zombie grandma, zoomed to the apparent center of the earth in a janitor closet, pressed up against entirely too damn much spandex, and he just wants to go home and binge watch old episodes of MST3K with a cold bottle of beer, the afghan his dead mother knitted back in 1993 and the claustrophobia-inducing weight of his twenty-pound cat on top of his chest.

“Son, you better watch–”

“Jesus Christ.” Bucky turns and yanks hard on the supply closet door, but it doesn’t budge. “I’m going home. Thanks for the adventure Steven.” He yanks harder but it still won’t open. “I’m just going to get this-” He pulls harder, determined not to look like a complete idiot. “-Open-” he gasps out. “-And pull that god-damned mop handle!” It’s stuck, and its not going to move, and now his breath is coming harder, and he’s on the brink of either a panic attack or a rage spiral or maybe even both,

A warm hand clamps down on his shoulder, and he doesn’t even have to turn to know it’s Mr. Congeniality himself.

“Hey. It’s alright. They have to phone in upstairs to get the lift back.”

Bucky bows his head in defeat and lets Steve lead him back to Nick.

“The kid, Steven.” 

Now Bucky knows he’s just doing it to be an ass.

“He’s the one I told you about! Come on, Nick. I’ve background-checked him. He’s fine.”

Bucky squirms out from under the firm hand and calmly sets down his messenger bag, then removes his glasses and carefully sets them down on top of the pile. “I’m sorry. You what now?” 

He’s itching for a fight. Itching to be the one to punch the star spangled idiot in the mouth. His good punching arm is still wrapped in plaster and out of commission, but his left needs practice and damn it, he is 100% not alright with being surveilled by government ‘alien’ entities aka ‘The Avengers’ aka a group of crazy psychopathic do-gooders with a death wish.

“He’s going to fight you?” Nick’s actually looking at Steve with some modicum of astonishment, and Steve’s just looking at Bucky, smiling widely and nodding along.

“I believe he very well might,” Steve chirps, just as Bucky throws the first punch.

He aims for the jaw, underneath that ridiculous cowl, and he feels the skin flatten ever so slightly with the weight of his fist, and hears the slap of bone against bone, but Steve just stands there. Still smiling.

Bucky pulls back and rubs his fist against his side.

“Feel better?” Steve asks.

“A little,” Bucky grinds out, petulantly. Then he turns to Nick. “Might just punch you too.”

Nick’s good eye rises, and he tilts his head, just egging Bucky on. “Didn’t get you too far on Cap’s fine features. Probably not going to feel to good when I press this little button here”—he opens his trenchcoat to reveal a small device pinned to his belt,—“and half of S.H.I.E.L.D military ops show up and take you out.”

“Oh, just leave him alone.” Steve turns back to Bucky and pulls him close, then looks him up and down, eyes flickering briefly to his still useless left arm. “Take a deep breath. Leave Director Fury alone.”

Bucky squirms and tries to look behind him, increasingly uncomfortable and just dying to escape. Director Fury. The executive director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Basically the man who has the power to destroy his entire future.

Despite his life being pathetic, Bucky’s pretty sure it could get infinitely worse without a source of disposable income.

Steve just holds him tight and forces him to look up into deep blue eyes. “Breathe,” Steve says again.

“I’m breathing,” Bucky mumbles, taking an exaggerated breath to prove it.

“Good.” Steve looks at him one moment longer, then lets go. “Come on. There’s lots of neat stuff to see.”

 _Neat_ , Bucky thinks. Director Fury’s eyes are burning holes into the cotton mix of his sweater. _Fucking_ _Neat_.


	3. Chapter 3

They descend even deeper. 

They traverse the grandiose bunker of S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters proper, and Bucky focuses on keeping his mouth closed and not gaping like an overgrown koi in a too-small pond. They are two thousand meters under the ground right now (or so Steve boasts in an unending commentary that has wiggled its way through Bucky’s ears and is now burrying deep within his brainstem,) and it is a technological and architectural phenomenon of a man made creation. It’s marble. All of it is marble. They are clicking and clacking their way down a pure uncut marble floor that is at least six football fields long and all along the way there are masses of people filing and typing and chatting and acting as though this isn’t strange in the least bit, and of course they come here to work every day, and what, don’t you also use the floo network to travel to work?

The last thought makes Bucky smile a little, until he thinks on it a bit more. Because really, how on earth are thousands of people being transported to an underground bunker system the size of a small city?

Maybe they _are_ wizards. Maybe S.H.I.E.L.D is a massive cover-up operation. Maybe Voldemort sent aliens to New York and the wizards are preparing for a massive revolt.

“There’s a very large circuit of elevators housed in small S.H.I.E.L.D. offices, much like the one we came through,” Steve says, as though he’s not only surveilled his entire life and personal practices, but has also gotten his hands on some piece of incredulous S.H.I.E.L.D. tech and now can read Bucky’s thoughts. 

Bucky blows a stray piece of hair from his forehead and just walks, desperately trying to keep his eyes only on the floor in front of them. He doesn’t answer. But hundreds of questions are bursting within him, desperate to be voiced.

How can they guarantee the security of those offices?

What is their security system setup even remotely like? They let him in on only Steve’s word...who else has access to this enormous network of government intel?

How do you even apply to get a job here? Who _are_ these people? What do they study? Did they go to school and sign up for the ‘top secret governmental agency cover-up for wizard-like-muggles?’

Ok he has _got_ to lose the Harry Potter metaphor.

Steve stops at a far wall that is once again, pure, unadulterated marble. There is a tiny cutout, exactly chest high, and he removes one of his gloves and pushes his finger into the hole. There is a faint clicking sound that Bucky feels more than he hears, and then the wall lights up a faint greenish color, in the shape of one Mr. Steve Rogers, and dissolves.

_One more Harry Potter reference,_ he pleads with himself. Fucking Floo Powder.

“Come on,” Steve says and holds out his hand. Bucky takes it and closes his eyes as they step through the portal.

It’s a curious feeling—almost electric—as Steve pulls him through. The buzz on his skin penetrates down to his muscles and bones, but it doesn’t hurt. Just thrills him. It’s like too much caffeine on a morning without breakfast or the final push to finish by a deadline. Slightly nausea inducing, but intoxicating.

Then they’re out.

Bucky looks behind him and sees just solid marble—but on this side of the portal, it’s black. He wonders for a moment where on the planet they could have possible found a solid vein of marble running through the earth, and how they could have cut it, and what it would have taken to drag it here, but Steve is once again pulling at his arm like an excited puppy. Bucky files the marble query under the ‘addendum to S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters Report: Miscellany that deserves further attention’ folder in his brain.

That folder might get a lot of use today, because now Bucky is really examining where they’ve ended up and it’s…

Magical.

They are standing at the top of a three story staircase that spirals downwards in six different directions. Far below, countless hallways spider-web out, all lined with dark silvery doors. It’s curiously silent. Where as the white side of the wall contained the chaos of an upper level corporation, the black side is strangely absent of most human life. Far down a middle hallway, Bucky can see a line of men, garbed in black, moving forward in a stilting, patrolling fashion. They almost seem to be guarding the place, though he still has no idea what ‘the place’ even is.

“Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D.” Steve says, almost reverently. 

He looks a picture—standing at the top the enormous flight and looking outwards, decked entirely in his red, white, and blue. He looks like a superhero of old. A superhero from the comic books that Bucky’s Pa read as a kid and passed down. A superhero who’s fictional, an idol, and doesn’t only exist to save the world from chaos of their own creation. Bucky can almost understand why he insists on wearing the uniform everywhere he goes. 

Almost.

Bucky steps forward next to him and leans on the filigreed rail, looking down over a domain that looks like it was carved for the Gods. “Who’re the goons in the tac gear?” Bucky asks snidely.

Steve sighs. “S.H.I.E.L.D. Strike team. They guard the facility. Keep everyone...safe.” 

There’s something tight in his voice now, and Bucky almost questions him on it, but the tension in Steve’s jaw belays a larger story. And Bucky doesn’t need to hear a larger story. He doesn’t need to know the background of Captain America and who his friends are and who he has a beer with after an alien fight and what corny pulp fiction novel he reads at night to fall asleep. Bucky’s curious, but he also wants to collapse into his bed later, and not have to think about a tenuous thread of friendship that he may or may not live up to. 

He doesn’t need that on him.

Mr. Fluffypants is a good cuddler. And he even listens. Bucky doesn’t need anyone else.

 

“They’re the good guys,” Steve continues. “They just have an agenda. Everyone here has an agenda.”

“Understood.” Bucky watches them come to the foyer entrance. The lead one looks up for a moment, and spots them standing there.

“Hey! Rogers!”

His voice echoes strangely throughout the space. The hardness of the surrounding marble eats up more sound than Bucky would have thought possible. His words are clear, but they sound small—far more distant than the man actually is.

“Good day fellow freedom fighters! Good day, Brock!”

Bucky snaps back to Steve, eyeing him warily. The relaxation of Steve’s vernacular had taken place so slowly that even Bucky had failed to realize that he was speaking almost like a normal human being. This sudden transfer back to comic book formality rocks him uneasily. Here is Captain America. And Captain America is distinctively _not_ Steve Rogers.

Bucky files that away under ‘addendum to S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters Report: The many faces of Cap.’

“Uh, good day!” The head of the patrol unit, Brock, salutes, the faint crease of his smirk noticeable even from Bucky’s perch atop the staircase. 

The men turn and single file progress down the next hallway to their left, and Bucky stays silent, waiting for the release of Steve’s breath.

“Right. So–”

“Friends of yours?” Bucky asks, then mentally curses himself. What is the point of having a riotous inner monologue going at all times if you don’t pay attention to the advice that the riotous inner monologue delivers you?

“It’s...complicated.”

“Right. Well. So where’s the shield?”

“What?” Steve turns to him now, his eyes hooded underneath the cowl, but curious.

“The shield. You said you needed to pick up a shield, oh this is ridiculous just wait a minute.” Bucky reaches forward, unable to stop himself, and fingers at the clasp holding the chin strap to Steve’s helmet.

“Don’t.” 

Steve’s hands fall heavily on Bucky’s and he looks up in surprise. “Sorry. I just—you look absolutely ridiculous. Like a walking caricature of a human being. Are you trying to go for Tick vibes here?”

“I am not a blood sucking parasite.”

“Oh quit it. You spoke normally enough when Fury was involved. You’re hiding behind the damn ‘A’ on your forehead. I know you aren’t this stupid.”

“I am not a blood sucking parasite,” Steve repeats, more insistently.

Bucky just rolls his eyes. “Look. If you want me to take you seriously at all, please just drop the act. The Tick. As in fictional character created as a spoof on comic book heroes. By cartoonist Ben Edlund. 1980s. I know you might not know the fleshed out details of the reference, but you also know I’m not comparing you to an insect. So quit it.”

Steve is watching him thoughtfully now, and the eye contact would almost be enough to make Bucky squirm, but he’s still wearing the damn helmet so instead Bucky just groans and massages his temples with the pads of his fingertips.

“You like comic books a lot, don’t you?”

Once again, Steve’s voice jolts him. “ _That’s_ what you got out of my rant? That I like comic books? Not that I want you to speak to me like a real human being and not as some weird alien entity who doesn’t seem to understand the most basic of human social cues?”

Steve shrugs. “It just seems like you do.” 

“Good grief.” Bucky straightens and runs his good hand through his hair, sweeping it off of his forehead. His glasses are smeared from their brief foray into the depths of his sweaty palms, and he takes a moment to remove them and clean them on his shirt hem. “Used to. I used to like comic books. ‘Til it turned out all you heroes are just a bunch of assholes.”

Steve watches him for another long moment, and Bucky shrugs uncomfortably under the piercing blue stare. Then Steve smiles. Laughs as though Bucky’s just cracked a joke that is the epitome of hilarity, and Bucky realizes how put-on just every minute detail of Steve’s entire persona really is. 

The way he holds himself. Rigid, upright, spine straight as though someone high above them is pulling on him with an invisible thread.

The push of his smile. The laugh lines that penetrate his smooth skin, but that never seem to crease quite enough.

The suit.

The cowl.

The jarring speech.

He’s trying to think his way through who Captain America really is, who this person who is the face of the superhero movement in New York City really is, when he realizes Steve is pulling him down the flight of stairs to their left and he actually has to watch his feet because the staircase spirals just angular enough that he may very well misstep and send them both careening down a two story flight of marble.

When they finally reach the bottom, Steve points a gloved finger down a hallway on their right.

“This way!” he announces gleefully.

The entrance to the hall is marked with a large gold-plated number fifteen. They are somewhere in the middle of the system, and Bucky estimates that there are probably around thirty identical hallways in all. They give a sort of catacombs-esque appearance, though they lack the creepy brick and mortar quality that might inspire Edgar Allen Poe to churn out numerous novellas. 

The marble is polished to perfection. Black, but with such a sheen you can almost trust yourself to walk straight through as though it opens into nothing. Bucky resists the urge to trail his fingers across the perfectly veined surface as they walk past ironwrought doors.

Each one of these has a number too. Carved intricately at eye-level in the plating of the door, they are almost hidden within the fascinating metalwork—leaves, vines, flowery confections, crystalline in their detail and overwrought to the point of excess. Bucky still makes them out as they walk past—15.1, 15.2, 15.3–-

Steve stops in front of 15.4 and breathes in deeply. 

Bucky frowns. “Should I be wearing my superhero uniform for whatever is behind this door? Because my spandex hasn’t been cleaned, and it’s covered in cat hair.”

“Shh.” 

Steve holds a finger to his lips, and Bucky fidgets, resisting the urge to bite his nails. This entire experience is profoundly unsettling but this—watching Steve wait in silence? It raises the hair at the back of Bucky’s neck. Without an asinine quip, without a word of assurance, silent Steve is absolutely agitating.

“Stop moving.” Steve finally speaks. “I’m trying to listen.”

Bucky does stop, but his curiosity has finally reached levels of undeniability. “Listening? I thought we were here for a shield. Why are you listening for a shield?”

Steve turns and looks at him, and for the first time he has a glimmer of impatience reflected in his eyes behind the mask.

“Right. Sorry.” Bucky gives in and sticks his thumb in his mouth. Tears at the quick.

Steve’s shoulders sigh down in sudden downward motion and he presses his palm against the door. It shimmers—much like the marble wall that they entered from—and then they walk through the entrance to Room 15.4.


	4. Chapter 4

The entire room is home to one enormous aquatic pool. The plexiglass reaches up higher than Bucky can see, and it’s plated with the same metal moulding as the doors. He opens his mouth to ask why on earth an aquarium needs to be plated with magical mystical metal of some unknown realm, and then closes it so quickly, he bites down on his tongue.

There’s a tentacle monster in the pool.

He tastes blood, and his tongue is bleeding, but more importantly, the enormous fucking thing is coming straight for them so fast that Bucky just throws himself on the ground with his arms shielding his head. 

Tentacle Monster of Insanity hits the plated plexiglass with a sound that may well shatter his eardrums, but the tank doesn’t break. 

So now he’s crouched down on the floor, and there is an enormous sea creature watching him with what looks like extreme distaste and– 

Oh. Yes. Steve the superhero asshole is laughing at him.

Bucky picks himself off the pristine floor and crosses his arms in front of himself, scowling miserably. “Funny.”

Steve keeps laughing.

“No, this is really hilarious. Keep laughing Apolo.”

Steve scrunches up his face at that one for a moment. “Apolo?”

“Speed skater. Famous. Wears spandex.”

Steve walks over and stands next to Bucky. Bucky watches Tentacle Monster of Insanity, and Tentacle Monster of Insanity watches them, and Bucky really wants to go back to bed. He wants to wake up tomorrow and walk the three blocks to the office where he can sit in his cubicle and hate his coworkers and drink his coffee, black, and forget he ever met Steve Rogers.

“You already made a speedskating joke. You’re getting lazy.”

“I…” Bucky’s tired. He’s tired and irritated, and he’s jumpy because there is an extraterrestrial creature of doom staring at him from behind the confines of a much too-thin barrier. “Why the hell is that thing here? What even _is_ that thing?”

“It’s some sort of hybrid program that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been working on developing?”

“It has–” Bucky pauses momentarily to count. “-eleven tentacles. That are all longer than I am. Why the fuck does S.H.I.E.L.D. need an eleven tentacled hybrid monster?”

“Arms,” Steve corrects him in the most patronizing tone imaginable. “They are his arms. He gets upset when you refer to them as tentacles. You can see the numerous suckers along the ventral surface of the arm—rather than clustered at the ends.”

“Since when is Captain America a marine biologist?” Bucky growls. He has officially reached his limit for inanity. This is ridiculous, and he’s starting to think that Rick from Accounting dosed his coffee with hallucinogenic drugs.

Steve just shrugs. “I like him. We’re buddies.”

“He just charged the fucking plexiglass like a rhinoceros. That thing is not a _buddy_.”

“He’s quiet. He listens well. More than I can say for you.”

Bucky huffs. He didn’t ask to be brought along on this little misadventure. He’s being treated like he’s five years old and, well...ok. He’s acting a bit like he’s five years old. But he’s been taken completely out of his routine, out of his comfort zone. He’s been thrown at aliens, walked down the streets with Captain Fucking America, thrust into the bowels of a secret government lab experiment and–

Steve’s got his hand pressed against the plating of the tank and the Tentacle Creature of Insanity— _ok fine_ , _Eleven-Armed Enormous Octopus Thing,_ Bucky amends—is holding one long suction-cupped limb along the other side of the glass as though it is trying to reach out and touch him.

***

Steve chooses hallways and doors with expert knowledge, but he also does it with a carefully chosen precision. If Bucky didn’t know any better, he’d guess that good old rule-following Cap was trying to avoid the Strike team and attempting to conduct his ‘tour of the mad-science grounds’ as undetected as possible.

He sees miracles, and wonders, and terrifying horrors. He sees a room the size of three adjacent football fields, with curving tracks and hovering one-person vehicles. He sees a room barely the size of a small closet that holds only the tiniest microchip, encased behind layers and layers of glass. Steve tells him it can hold the entire scope of the human mind and they are working towards testing on willing subjects.

Bucky gags in horror. Imprintation of another being layered over your own self-conscious sounds like the reckless idea of someone far too rich to have any sense of morality left.

There is a room they step into and immediately shiver—it is nothing more than a freezer, but it holds hundreds of speckled eggs. Steve tells him with a grin that they are dinosaur embryos. 

Bucky reads over the tiny printed labels on each container. They’re just chickens. 

In 26.12 Bucky finally sees the aforementioned shield. 

He has to admit, even despite Steve’s glowing recommendations on the subject, he’d anticipated somewhat of a lukewarm reaction to the thing. He’s seen photos of the very first shield. Video of many iterations. Hell, he’d fought side by side Cap a few days ago and he’d watched Steve toss around a previous mode. Bucky’d been preoccupied just enough at the time with green alien goo and the razor-sharp-slice-and-dice-variety pincer claws that he hadn’t been terribly impressed.

But this new model really is a thing of pure beauty. It glistens with a soft metallic sheen, but wavers just ever so slightly, so that it almost looks as though the disk were liquid, bending in ways that should work horribly against the laws of physics. The rings of the shield alternate with a variegated style of that liquid metal, and a smoother finish, all the way down to the simple star in the center.

It’s black.

There’s no hint of red, or blue, not even a touch of white. Just an unadulterated, viscous black. It pulls at his vision in all sorts of uncomfortable ways—almost as if he is looking into another space or time entirely. 

He may very well might be. Bucky can’t put anything past S.H.I.E.L.D technology at this point.

Steve steps forward, and Bucky can see by the flutter of pulse at his throat that he is holding himself back. Steve wants to touch it, hold on to it. 

“Seems a little subtle for your current...erm...get-up.”

Steve doesn’t even take his eyes off the shield, just swallows.

Bucky watches Steve carefully—watches every blink of his eyes, watches the cadence of each breath. He can see it there, how much he yearns to take it up, and how much it pains him that it’s come to this. 

Steve Rogers. Born July 4th, 1920. 

Bucky really doesn’t know much about the guy. Sure, he knows his birthday. Everyone toasts and shouts it from the goddamned rooftops every Independence Day at this point. There’s parties, and theme drinks, and pin the shield on the Cap and even a National Dress-Like-Captain-America contest put on by the fucking government.

He knows the quotes. The “Avengers, Assemble!” and the less popular, but no less drilled into every child in a basic high school history course, “I’m loyal to nothing, but the dream.”

He knows that Steve Rogers volunteered for this. He wanted to be experimented on by the government, he wants to fight the bad guys, he wants the American people to live in freedom, in peace, without dictatorship.

But why? Why would a 21 year old kid allow himself to be taken in by crappy propaganda? Where was his family? His friends? Is there anyone left still alive who actually knows Steve Rogers?

The caricature is starting to make more sense. It’s a shield. Just as much as any piece of weaponized S.H.I.E.L.D. tech, Steve Rogers hides behind the mantle of Captain America. And it must be incredibly lonely.

The realization washes over Bucky as Steve turns to him.

“They’ll paint it, I’m sure.” Steve shrugs—the smallest hint of sigh present on his lips. “They always do.”

“It’s...nice?” Bucky’s well aware that now he’s floundering like an idiot. He pulls his glasses off again, cleans them against his shirt in what he’s coming to realize is his trademark ‘I’m a floundering idiot please don’t look at me right now’ tic.

“It’s a god-damned piece of art.”

Bucky almost drops his glasses.

“What? I’m not a robot.” Steve smiles, then holds a pointer finger steadily to his lips. “Mums the word though. Don’t want to ruin the...image.” Then he winks. Again. 

“I…” 

“Got one more thing to show you. Then we’re done. I’ll take you home.” Steve holds the door open, ever the perfect gentleman, and Bucky can’t help being a grade-A dick about it.

“Most my dates at least offer to buy me dinner.” 

“Most my dates offer to suck my–”

Bucky walks into the doorframe. 

“Careful there, kid. There’s a door.”

Bucky rubs at his head and scowls up. Captain America, the man who is painted in patriotism, just outsassed him by a longshot.

“I need a fucking drink.”

“After this. One last thing. I swear.”

Bucky doesn’t even want to know.

***

Of all the rooms, this one seems at first glance, to be the most normal. The interior of 2.34 is decked out in commercial grade hotel-hospitality beige and crimson carpeting. Just looking at the hideous patterning on the floor makes Bucky’s head swim. 

There are no complicated machines. No wall to wall feats of engineering, or technology, or radioactive marine-creatures.

There _is_ dust. A lot of it.

It’s clear that not many people come this way, and Bucky can understand why from the looks of things. He’s just seen enough modern marvels in this Willy Wonka style factory of strange to make his head swim. This last room is innocuous to say the least.

Steve makes his way to the center of the space, where there is old, tattered caution tape strung up in a circular fashion. As Bucky follows, he makes out a hole in the flooring there. 

“Impressive hole. Really exotic example of poor quality construction work.”

Steve stays silent. They’d finally broken through the icy exterior, enough for fucking dick jokes, but now he’s clammed up again, back to stoicism and fortitude and dramatics–

The caution tape is fluttering ever so slightly.

Bucky’s eyes narrow. 

Each room they’ve seen thus far has had some incredibly complex and highly functioning system of air ventilation that has functioned without any semblance of actual traditional venting unit. They’ve been closed off, isolated, completely secure. He has no idea how they are actually pumping oxygen, all he knows is that the air does _not_ move.

But something is blowing that tape.

Steve is standing at the opening now, looking down, and the tape is brushing against his kneepad. Bucky swallows, and follows.

The very air seems to congeal around them, flecks of dust solidifying at eye level.

It’s expansive. Black. The same black as the star on the shield. Dizzying and mesmerizing, something about the pool below them calls to his very soul. He’s felt this way before, and it brings up memories, terrifying and sobering.

Climbing to the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains while on summer vacation in college and wanting, for just one fleeting moment, to step off the edge, to try to fly.

Driving a car when he visited Porbandar, India during grad school. He’d seen the expansive ocean on his left and fought not to turn off the cliff, to jump and soar through the blue of the sky.

This feels the same. The curiosity, the need to understand. He’s so close to unlocking something enormous and he inches forward ever further.

The desire he has to step forward and fall into the ebony blackness overwhelms him and he stumbles backwards with a shudder. 

“You alright, kid?”

Steve hasn’t looked away, and Bucky mutters in irritation, “Don’t call me kid. What is that? What is this place?”

“Home,” Steve says, cryptically. “Everywhere. Nowhere. Time.”

“I feel sick.”

Steve nods. “It does that.” His voice sounds distant, echoing soundlessly throughout the room. Reverberating against Bucky’s soul in a way that hums pleasantly. 

Bucky backs up another step. “Steve?”

Steve turns finally, and Bucky sees him unclench his fists. His palms are lined with crescents of white indentation—where the nails were pressed tightly against skin. 

“Steve?” He tries again, but his voice tastes thick in his mouth, like the agave syrup he poured over plantains in Pereira.

“Come on. I’ll walk you back home.”


	5. Chapter 5

Home is a studio apartment on the lip of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It’s red brick (because everything is red brick) and it’s a shithole and within a year or two some yuppy rich Manhattanite and his yuppy rich wife will buy up all of the property and gentrify the shit out of the neighborhood.

Which will force Bucky even further from his job. 

But hey, who doesn’t like a good juice bar?

They don’t walk. They take the subway, and the crowds of people almost start a riot trying to snap photos of Captain America. Bucky ignores them, for the most part. He tunes it out and thinks of his mom, and how much he’d love to hear her voice again. He pulls a worn copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide out of his messenger bag and tries to read.

He can’t.

He’s not sure what exactly the black hole in the floor of 2.34 is, but that desire to fly is one that he will never sate, and he sure as hell recognizes the heavy melancholy sitting around his shoulders that denying it has inspired. 

Depression is a coiling, inky monster that lives within his chest, reaching it’s insidious fingertips towards his heart at every misfire of memory. Bucky’s lived with it for as long as he can remember, and he knows how to keep it at bay. For the most part.

He had a therapist when he was younger. She’d sit across from him tapping her pen gently on a legal pad—not in any sort of remonstrative way, but more so born of her own anxieties. He remembers her smile. Her cool green eyes, and her kinky, coiled hair that she always kept pulled tightly back on top of her head. 

She told him things like “breathe,” and “allow yourself time,” and “remember to grieve”. 

If he walked into her office today, she’d tell him things like “don’t jump into a black hole” and “have you considered the metaphorical significance that your desire for jumping into a pit of darkness might hold in your day to day life?” and “really, James, please don’t jump in the black hole.”

“His name is Bucky Barnes!” Bucky hears, and he jolts back to reality.

The train is stopping, and shit—it’s his stop—and suddenly hordes of obnoxious travelers are swarming him because, let’s face it, despite the man-behind-the-mask bravado and general tilt towards human decency of epic proportions, Captain America is a dick.

“Steve! This is our stop!” Bucky calls, but cellphones flashes are clicking, and books are being shoved in his direction.

“Oh my God, you’re the one who he carried out of the coffeeshop!”

“Will you sign my bag?”

“Will you sign my notepad?”

“Was it like, amazing, when he scooped you up?”

“Will you sign my face?”

“Steve!” Bucky hollers, and Cap is there, pushing through, grabbing his hand, and pulling him from the train. 

They watch the doors close—the mobs of young 20-somethings plastered up against the glass like flies, and then Bucky swears. “God dammit. I left my book.”

“Captain! Captain of this vessel! STOP THE VESSEL!” Steve hollers.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Bucky swears, and he has to grab at Steve’s arm. 

Steve’s moving. And now Bucky’s dragged along with him Because Steve’s trying to run as the train picks up speed. Presumably trying to catch the front car, catch the train operator’s attention, get the train operator to stop 733,000 lbs of steel, so that Bucky canswat his way through the buzzing onlookers once more and rescue his precious book. 

“Forget it! Let’s just get out of here, alright? My apartment’s only a few blocks from here.”

To his credit, Steve actually does stop. Looks down, and makes a note of what Bucky can only assume is some mix of horror, embarrassment, and pure exhaustion plastered across his face. 

“Just forget it, alright?”

Steve does.

***

Mr. Fluffypants is waiting for them at the door. Bucky pushes in and scoops the giant, fuzzy, orange-and-black speckled persian cat up in his arms. He buries his face in Mr. Fluffypants’s fur, and the cat purrs and purrs in return, then reaches up to bite his hair and pull.

“Stop that, Mr. Fluffypants.”

“Ahem.”

Bucky nods his head at Steve, who is standing awkwardly outside the door still. It’s the first time he’s has ever looked vaguely uncomfortable—as far as Bucky’s seen. “Are you coming in?”

“Should I...take my shoes off first?”

Bucky bursts out laughing. “Oh my God, you are something. Is it even possible to take your…” he motions with his head, as his arms are full of Mr. Fluffypants, “shoe, boot, leather foot covering things off without losing the entire outfit?”

Steve’s face actually wrinkles in consternation. “Huh. I didn’t even think about it. But no. There is actually an inner lining that hooks into the legs of the suit–”

“I really don’t need to know, dude. No. You don’t need to take your shoes off. Come in.”

Steve sighs in relief. “Thank you.”

“Mr. Fluffypants is a trained vampire hunter though, so don’t try any funny business.”

“I’m sorry?”

Bucky puts the cat down. “Inviting you in...vampires…?” Steve stares. “Ugh. Nevermind.” Bucky shrugs off his jacket and bag, and slips his own shoes off. Mr. Fluffypants yowls loudly at his feet, and Bucky pushes him aside with his foot. “You gotta wait a minute, man.”

“That...thing..looks like a tribble.”

Bucky’s head snaps up. “Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? Did you just make a Star Trek reference?”

“I’m not entirely hopeless,” Steve shrugs ruefully. The guys at the tower have been educating me on what I’ve missed. I particularly enjoy Star Trek.” He looks down once more. “And that thing is highly indistinguishable from a tribble.”

“You did not just come to _my_ house and insult Mr. Fluffypants.”

“Tribble!’ Steve remarks, with a smile lighting up his jaw.

And then he removes the cowl.

Bucky stares. 

He just stares. He’s forgotten about the cat, he’s forgotten his arm in a cast that now has cat hair plastered all over the sweaty insides where the plaster meets his skin, he’s almost forgotten about the black hole

(he has definitely not really forgotten about the black hole.)

Because he’s finally looking at Steve Rogers. Not Captain America. Steve Rogers. And he looks exhausted.

He’s got wrinkled lines all around his eyes, and his forehead is slightly musty with dirt from the helmet. His chin is red where the straps connected with flesh. 

Steve tosses the helmet to the side and it lands on the old, weathered wooden flooring of Bucky’s apartment with a hollow thud. Then he sinks to the couch with a long sigh. A sigh of emptiness that reverberates through the small living space and tugs at something deep within Bucky—sets it ringing in his chest. 

This loneliness has shadowed his entire life,, but now a chord deep within him bursts into song. His chest is tight. His cheeks flush and he looks around for Mr. Fluffypants, desperate to grab him and bury his nose into his long soft fur and pretend that these emotions don’t actually exist.

“Got any good music?” Steve interrupts Bucky’s emotional self-immolation and he couldn’t be more grateful.

“Uh...some? What do you like to listen to?”

“You have any Fleet Foxes?”

Bucky looks up, incredulity painting his face. “Uh. You listen to Fleet Foxes?”

“Sure. What, you think I sit alone in my apartment at Avengers Tower with a record player slowly spinning, creaking out lilting accordion music and sad, scratchy jazz?” 

Steve’s eyebrows are raised and the look he’s giving Bucky is such a perfect caricature of upset/puppy dog/preppy college boy that Bucky almost bursts out laughing.

“My colleagues gave me a pretty thorough rundown when I came off the ice. And Bruce has good taste in music.”

“The _Hulk_ likes Fleet Foxes?” Now Bucky’s the one who looks ridiculous.

“Sure! He’s not all big, green, and angry. Bruce is pretty low-key most the time.”

Bucky nods and turns to the small desk against the wall that houses his laptop. “Give me just a second. I’ll pull it up.” 

Steve leans back, the hard lines of his body sinking into the dirty tan of Bucky’s couch. He looks happier, but the entire picture of Captain America in his red, white, and blue leaning against the shitty apartment couch fills Bucky with dread. It’s wrong. It’s all wrong. Captain America saves children and people, and rescues cats from trees before the fire department can even arrive, and here he is propped up against smudged beige. He’s sitting in an apartment that barely looks lived in, because Bucky hates the idea that this is it—this is where every choice in his life has led him—a cheap-ass apartment in Brooklyn that’s even shittier than where he grew up.

He’s never going to get out of here, to make a difference, to ascend. 

The soft acoustic chords of Helplessness Blues dance about the apartment, and Steve closes his eyes and smiles. He’s different now. Despite the spandex, he looks human. 

Bucky’d rather be listening to VAST. He’s just in that kind of mood.

“So. What d’your other pals at the tower listen to?”

Steve opens his eyes again and looks to the ceiling for a moment in thought. There’s a disgusting brown stain that has spread from the uppermost left hand corner from a year ago when the apartment above him flooded. He’d heard the guy killed himself in his bathtub and left the water running. 

They’d all been evacuated for a couple days on that one.

_Jesus_ , he thinks to himself. _Snap the fuck out of it!_

“Tony’s kind of a douchebag about his musical tastes. Super pretentious. As you can well imagine,” Steve laughs. “He likes the obscure bands from the 70s and 80s and woe is you if you don’t let him talk your ear off about the wonders of the funk bass lines.”

A grin plays at Bucky’s mouth as he imagines Mr. Stick-in-the-ass-Ironman jamming out to funk.

“And Nat listens to a lot of angry women screaming loudly. Not even really sure it qualifies as music. Just noise.” Steve pauses another moment. “Clint’s the true eclectic one. I’ve walked in on him jumping off his bed like he’s high on some massive upper while air guitaring to Panic at the Disco. But I’ve also seen him crying to Yanni of all things. Screeching his lungs out to Led Zeppelin, and crooning with Johnny Cash. Just yesterday he was trying to get me to come sit with him while he listened to Penderecki. Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima? I don’t know. It was a lot of noise. But he claimed that his heart was trying to rip right out of his chest because of it.”

Bucky almost bursts out laughing. It’s so fitting, and yet so somber and tragic. They are still all humans. Super. With special powers, and abilities, and strengths. Yet they are even worse off than celebrities. Their entire existences are meted out to the public in perfect, serving size amounts so that the world doesn’t rise up against them for fear of being controlled by comic book men and women in capes. Maintaining a sense of identity through that? Must be rough.

“Hey!” Bucky interjects. “How is that guy anyway?”

“Who, Clint?”

“Yeah,” Bucky nods along. “Hawkeye. Last time I saw him, he was slowly rolling down the side of a building like Wacky Wally the Original Wall Climber.”

Steve grins. “Ok, I truly have no idea what that reference means. But Clint’s doing alright. Bit banged up, but he’s usually wandering the halls of the towers covered in bandages and bruises. It’s kind of his M.O.”

“Huh.” 

The music lulls around them for a moment as it transitions into the next track. The rolling chords and twirling melodies cascade out and fill the small space. Bucky watches Mr. Flufflypants walk stiffly into the room again, despite the cacophony around him, and look sternly in his owners direction. Then he very purposely stalks to his pink kitty bed under the desk and curls up.

Bucky doesn't miss the fact that the butt end of his cat is now the end facing them both.

Mr. Fluffypants can be kind of a dick.

“So why are you here?” It’s a jarring question. Bucky almost regrets interrupting the supremely bizarre, yet oddly comforting moment of companionship to bring it up, but it needs to be said.

Steve purses his lips. Looks up at the ceiling again, towards that stain, then eyes around the barren eggshell walls. “Did you just move in?”

“Oh. Err, no. I just haven’t really…” Bucky takes a moment to settle in at the opposite end of the couch from Steve and tucks his knees into his chest, resting his chin atop them. “I just haven’t decorated.”

“Huh.” Steve looks intrigued by this, but not particularly surprised. “You remind me of someone.”

Now Bucky cocks his head—still resting on the bony outcropping of his knee, but tilts towards Steve out of curiosity. “What?”

“You asked me why I’m here.” Steve smiles and closes his eyes—leans back into the couch whose old and decrepit springs give a halfhearted _screek_ of protest against the weight of the superhero suddenly pressing into them. “You remind me of someone I used to know.” 

His eyes stay closed, but he stops speaking. Lapses into silence. 

Bucky huffs a frustrated breath of air. “You’re here because I remind you of someone that you used to know. That’s all I get? The remnants of a Gotye chorus?”

Steve squints one eye open in Bucky’s direction and chuckles. “Alright, admittedly I deserved that one. And before you roll your eyes so far back in your head that they fall down your throat, yes, I know that reference.” He tilts his head back, and smiles. Completely relaxed. 

_The Superhero on My Couch_ will be Bucky’s next get-rich-quick-scheme. A coffee table companion book. Exploitative journalism at its finest. 

“I had a friend growing up,” Steve speaks again. Softer this time. “Arnie. Arnie Roth. He was good people. Took up for me a lot when I was being bullied, was always at my side, never once blinked an eye when I came crawling back to the neighborhood with another split lip, bloody nose, black eye. We grew up together, you know? His ma and my ma were both nurses at the hospital downtown. They’d work late shifts, well into the night, and we’d kind of fend for ourselves. Good kid. Real good kid…” Steve drifts off now, almost sounding melancholy.

“What happened to him?” Bucky immediately hates himself for the question. Any number of things probably happened to him. The war. Death by crappy 1940s medicine. Death by fluke accident that could not be prevented by crappy 1940s medicine. Perhaps he lived? Maybe he is still alive and kicking at age...what? 90? Locked up in a nursing home and Steve is able to visit. Maybe he doesn’t remember anything and Steve watches the one link to his past stare up at him with frail, vacant eyes. 

Jesus. He’s usually pretty morbid but that damn portal did a number on him.

Any way you look at it though, the answer to his question is not going to be a happy one.

“Cancer.” Steve sits up then, and looks across at Bucky. “Cancer got him. Long before I came out of the ice. I’ve got good memories though. You know, he was the first one to recognize that tiny, asthmatic, pathetic Steve Rogers from Brooklyn was Captain America? Figured it out real quick. Said it was my fighting spirit, and heart. He just knew it had to be me.”

“Sorry.” Bucky looks down. He doesn’t really want to stare into those pools of honest blue any longer. He’s adept at dealing with loss and tragedy and no offense to Steve ‘bare-his-soul-in-the-living-room-of-the-person-he-just-met’ Rogers but he doesn’t really need any help feeling sad and pathetic at the moment. 

Or ever.

“He was a good guy. Fantastic boxer. Taught me a lot of my fighting tricks actually. Went on and served with distinction in the War. But he was dark too. Had this thread running through him of desperation. So badly wanted to make a difference in a world that had no use for him. I’m sure when he passed, he thought he’d never made a dent in the terrible nature of humanity, but…” Steve shrugged. “He was a good man. He died a good man. Wish I could have told him that.”

The slivers of evening sun push through the windowpanes and illuminate Mr. Flufflypant’s stately behind. Bucky didn’t realize how late it had gotten, or how dark the room was now. Steve is staring into the distance, lost in memory, but Bucky doesn’t move. Doesn’t want to interrupt the fragility of the moment between them.

“You remind me of him.” Steve’s words cut through the air as cleanly as the sun’s rays cut patterns into the wood floor. “You’d fight for anyone, no matter how insignificant they seem. You stood up against aliens, you helped me in that coffee shop, you never once backed down. But you carry a weight around you that you refuse to let go. The thread running through you is larger than his ever was. Your cracks are starting to show.”

“Thanks,” Bucky responds, dryly.

“You can’t save them all.”

“I never wanted to save them all.” He recognizes the bitterness in his tone, but speaking the words does nothing to quench the dryness he feels in the space behind his heart. It seems to beat hollowly now, too loud in his ears.

“You can’t save them all, but it doesn’t mean you should stop trying.”

Bucky grimaces, anger coursing through him again. “Doesn’t mean I should stop trying? Are you kidding me? It’s pointless for me to fight when there are superheroes around who can save the day. And writing? Reporting? _Investigative journalism_?” He spits out the last like venom. 

“It’s all useless, Steve. The world has changed. This isn’t picture perfect 1940s America. Now all people want is their social media, their sensationalist garbage. There isn’t room for churning out truth on Syrian rebel opposition groups that are massacering their countrymen when we could immerse ourselves fabrication and excess. Worry about what the Kardashians wear. Gossip about immigrants taking over our country. Attack the gays and their ‘liberal agenda’. What’s the point? Every article I’ve pitched has been shot down this year. Every. Single. One. And your precious S.H.I.E.L.D is no better. They propagate false stories, hide behind fake headlines, swear they are doing all they can and all the while? They are sitting on a laboratory containing ancient alien artifacts, things that could destroy the entire planet.”

He’s breathing hard, and tears threaten to spill, but he screws his eyes closed.. Mr. Fluffypants raises his head in annoyance, but he stands (slowly of course) and makes his way over to the oversized couch, pausing for a moment to walk back and forth at Bucky’s feet before leaping into his lap.

Steve’s eyes are full of shared sadness, but still a grin flits across his face. “That’s the thread. Well...fissure. Fucking plate tectonic shift, really.”

Bucky laughs, and wipes his damp eyes. “Sorry. Got a little carried away.”

“You didn’t though. You’re allowed to feel emotion. This country fucking sucks.”

“Two ‘fuckings’ in a row Mr. Goody Two-Shoes?” Bucky cocks a grin. “Don’t let S.H.I.E.L.D. hear. You _are_ kind of the posterboy for America.”

“When I wear the uniform, I’m the posterboy. Underneath?” Steve pauses and pulls at the spandex at his thigh, then chuckles at the light snapping sound the fabric makes. “Why do you think I never take off the uniform in public? The cowl? It’s all a mask. Allows me to be...that person. That superhero that everyone needs, all the time. Deep down I’m still Steve Rogers. Still able to take a punch. Still itching for a fight. Still human.”

“Yeah, I’d figured as much. The voice, the spandex, the shield. They’re all just a figment of America’s imagination.”

Steve shakes his head now, eyes on Bucky. “No. It’s not just a figment. Captain America is just as real as Steve Rogers. Two sides of the same coin. I know it feels like too much to you—like a...what was it you said earlier? Caricature?”

Bucky looks down, running his fingernails against a small stain on the suede fabric.

“I know that’s what Cap looks like. And I know that’s the image I give him, the voice I speak in, the actions and saluting, and feigned innocence. But he’s more than just that. I really do believe the ideals, what I’m fighting for.” He shakes his head. “What _we’re_ fighting for.”

Bucky stands up. “You hungry? I’m incredibly hungry. Magical mystery tours tend to sap my strength.” He walks towards the kitchen, ready to pull out the years worth of Chinese restaurant pamphlets that he’s got stashed away in the drawer by the refrigerator, but he doesn’t miss the whisper of Steve’s voice that follows him.

“It’s worth it, Bucky. I promise it’s worth it.”

***

The peppery smell of the vegetable lo mein wafts through the air as Bucky opens the sixth of six containers of takeout. Steve is holding a pair of chopsticks while rifling through take out container # 4 (broccoli and garlic sauce) and clearly pretending he knows how to use them perfectly, (spoiler alert: he does _not_ ), but he has a funny wrinkle to his nose that Bucky swears wasn’t there just a second ago.

“Whats up?” 

“Just…”

“Spit it out. You carried me like a blushing bride out of a coffee shop attacked by alien creatures, you stood stock still while I punched you with all my might and came away with nothing but a bruised ego, and you watched me basically burst into tears on my couch. If you don’t like Chinese, just say so. We’re a bit past etiquette formalities here.”

Steve’s chopsticks continue to flail wildly through the small container of vegetables. 

“It’s just…” he says, his nose wrinkling even more. “Where’s the beef?”

“Ugh.” Bucky rolls his eyes. “Of course, Mr. All-American Carnivore. Sorry my man, you’ll have to wait to bring down imminent socio-economic collapse from the comfort of your own apartment.”

“Uh–”

Bucky shrugs, then takes an obscenely large, (and side note: perfectly maneuvered) bite of lo mein. “Mmm,” he spits out, smacking his lips. “Vegetables.”

Steve gingerly puts a piece of broccoli to his lips. The crunch startles Mr. Fluffypants, who turns and glares meaningfully at him. Steve just shrugs back.

‘If you are attempting to communicate with Mr. Fluffypants, I’ll have you know that he’s a highly intelligent spy trained in international espionage. He will report.”

“Do you ever get tired of the constant snark?” Steve retorts.

“Do you ever get tired of eating dead animals?” Bucky asks. It’s petty. But he’s tired and his propensity for witty banter evaporated somewhere between crazy killer tentacle beast and mind-numbing hole in floor.

“Not particularly.”

“Well then,” Bucky shoves another large mouthful in and chews. “I guess you have your answer.”

Steve quiets, again just staring at the takeout containers lined up neatly in front of him. 

“I’m going through the portal tomorrow.”

Steve’s voice is somber, but it holds a tremor of electricity. Bucky looks down at his arm, the small hairs standing straight up. He puts his chopsticks down, picks up a napkin and wipes his mouth. 

Puts the napkin down.

Folds his hands neatly in his lap and leans forward.

“You what?”


	6. Chapter 6

Even without the mask on, Steve is statuesque, a monument to American golden boy perfection. Bucky watches his chest expand as he breathes in.

“I’m going back to 1941.”

“The the Portal?” Bucky says, but even as the word passes his parted lips, the shimmer of electricity intensifies and he _knows_. 

The last room in the bunker. The black hole, the caution tape blowing ever so slightly. The dust of decades congealed in the air around them. “You’re jumping,” he says. Swallows.

Steve nods. “I’m jumping.”

“But why?”

“There is something wrong here.” Steve turns, his blue eyes unwavering as they hold Bucky’s gaze. “You can feel it too. Something is out of place. A cog jammed, a moment pressed too tightly, then sprung abnormally forward. It all goes back to 1941, and I need to fix it.”

Bucky holds eye contactone moment more, then scoffs loudly. It’s a jarring sound, sharp and staccato, and Steve blinks. Bucky clears his throat. “You can’t possibly know that. You’re going to jump into a black hole in the floor based on a feeling?”

“I’ve seen things you can’t possibly imagine. Know things about what your government is keeping from its people. From you.” He holds up the palm of his hand as Bucky moves to interrupt. “I’m not trying to talk down to you, Bucky. And I know you think it’s insane. But I’m right. It needs to be fixed. We are on the edge and time is running out. I’m jumping tomorrow.”

He pauses momentarily to grab the glass of water that is placed precariously near the edge of the table. Bucky imagines it falling off and shattering into a thousand pieces, dampness spreading outwards on the carpet below. He imagines it falling down the hole and transforming, grey wings flapping as soot flakes off to reveal shimmering feathers underneath.

He shivers.

“I know you felt it when you stood at the brink. It calls to you. You’re thinking about it even now.”

“I–” Bucky sputters. 

This is insane. 

It’s inanity. 

Captain America is sitting on his couch eating Chinese take-out (alright, picking half-heartedly at Chinese take-out,) and casually talking about the end of the fucking world.

And he’s right.

Bucky doesn’t know why he knows it, or how he knows it, but the electricity is growing, and it’s all he can do not scratch his flesh off his bones because something is burning inside of him now and as sure as he knows that Mitt Romney’s binders full of women are actually binders full of sad, empty sheet protectors, he knows what Steve is going to say next.

“I want you to come with me.”

***

They finish the Chinese food. Steve actually does eat more than his fair share and actually does admit to vegetables being decent and actually does manage to drop his chopsticks only three times (which is twenty-six times less than Bucky anticipated.)

Steve tells him more about the 40s, and what to expect, and how S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to function (spoiler alert: giant underground bunkers containing weapons of mass destruction, alien weaponry, time traveling portals, and treasure from another realm are not exactly what Peggy Carter and Howard Stark envisioned for an agency built to protect mankind.

Bucky tells him that he will absolutely 100% in no shape or form be donning spandex.

Steve tells him about the space stone, and Red Skull (who, up until this point, Bucky has only read about in textbooks) and their fight aboard the Valkyrie. He tells him how his current hypothesis is that they ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe. One that leads to the underground S.H.I.E.L.D. bunker of today. And how it is distorting time knocking reality ever so slightly off it’s axis.

Bucky tells him that Mr. Fluffypants will be joining them.

Steve tells him that it’s dangerous, that things could go wrong, that he will do his best to protect Bucky along the way because Bucky will officially be a superhero, albeit one of sidekick status.

Bucky informs him that he will absolutely not be referred to as a sidekick and he can fend for himself thank you very much. Also, in 1941, Steve can just go ahead and forget that “I’m 92 years old” bullshit—Bucky will indeed be two full years older. Bucky’ll be the one saving Cap because it’s clear that even though he’s only known the guy for a week, he is a punk idiot..

Steve elbows him in the side and says “nice one kid.”

Bucky fumes.

In the end, they put together a somewhat solid plan, assuming ‘somewhat solid plan’ is defined as jumping through an apparent black hole, hoping desperately that it does indeed lead back to 1941 and not just one thousand six hundred and thirty two meters to imminent death on a rocky sub basement of S.H.I.E.L.D.

And Steve asks to sleep on the couch.

“Don’t you want to go home, say goodbye to your Avenger type friends, pack up your things or something before we do this?”

“Nah,” Steve shrugs. “I already packed up the room. They know. They’re down with it. My Avenger-type friends are actually a bunch of pretty cool folks. Think you’d get along with most of them real swell.”

“Uh-huh.” Bucky says, side-eyeing him with all the sass he can muster. 

“So, couch?” Steve says cheerfully.

“You’re kind of a weird dude.”

Steve shrugs, and grins a bit ruefully. “Yeah. I get that from time to time.” Then he throws his spandex covered legs up onto the remainder of the couch and rolls over.

***

They stand together, toes brushing the edge of the precipice.

Bucky closes his eyes and feels the stagnant dust flutter against his eyelashes. His hands are empty, and they open and close reflexively. 

Mr. Fluffypants is staying in 2012 and that makes his palms sweat. Bucky’s neighbor adores him though, and there’s still the tickle of idea that this is all a mistake, that this is the end of the line. Doesn’t seem fair to drag Mr. Fluffypants along for that.

Doesn’t seem fair to leave him behind either, but Steve’s right. Something is wrong. The world is off balance. And for the first time in thirteen years, a flutter of hope trembles in his chest

“You good kid?”

Bucky scowls up at Steve, who is back in his complete outfit, cowl and all. 

“It’s not too late. You can stay here.”

“Oh?” Bucky quips. “And leave you to your time-traveling shenanigans all on your lonesome?”

“It’s my duty. Not yours. I represent the American dream, the freedom to strive to become all that you dream of being–”

“Oh for fucks sake,” Bucky mutters, then he grabs Steve’s hand. “Shut up, you American idiot.” He spares a quick glance at Steve, but even behind the mask, Bucky sees a grin. It matches his own. Steve gives one squeeze of his hand.

The room begins to flicker as the current of electricity pounds between them and the congealing dust explodes and together, 

they fly.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my incredible beta reader and friend [Mystrana](http://mystrana.tumblr.com)! Pretty sure I wouldn't have finished this without you :)
> 
> Thank you to [Daphne](https://daphneblithe.tumblr.com/) for talking me through some awesome pop culture jokes!
> 
> AND THE ART!!
> 
> The wonderful artists who I worked with for the Captain America Big Bang 2018 did a fantastic job recreating some scenes!!  
> [An Awkward Avocado](https://anawkwardavocadoart.tumblr.com/)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/a/WOmEkVT)
> 
> [Deb Walsh](https://debwalsh.tumblr.com/)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/Ki32Bqr)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/vrdqJIi)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/B0gsTm6)  
> Art [HERE](https://imgur.com/gallery/9LRB8Jw)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Sidekick: The Art (well, some of it anyway!)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16123748) by [debwalsh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/debwalsh/pseuds/debwalsh)




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